Summary Information


Significance

Our project aims to research the effect that climate change has had on the US. Climate change is something important to address and understand, so we want to do some data analysis to determine the effect it already has on different parts of the world and whether it has already begun to impact people’s lives. We used 3 different data sets for our research.


Introduction to Data Sets/Summary Information

US Extreme Weather Index

One of the questions that we were interested in was the number of extreme weather days that the US had over the last 50 years. To answer this, we got the U.S. Climate Extremes Index (CEI) , which has a list of the percent of extreme weather days in the United States, as well as the number of actual percent of days that are extreme for the year.

There are some important takeaways looking at the data. First, the data set traces 110 years, from 1910 to 2019. In these observations, the year with the most days that were above the normal temperatures was 2012, with 86.6% of days above normal. The year with the highest amount of days below the normal temperatures was 1912. In total, for every 110 of the observations, the average amount of days that were extreme (low or high) was 19.8510909%.

Monthly Climate Conditions

Another question that our group was interested in was How do the average temperatures of each state in the United States today compare to the mean temperatures of past 50 years or more. To get the a data set for this, we went to the Global Historical Climatology Network-Daily (GHCN-D) for the Monthly Climate Conditions.

The data set above has 7 columns for data points within the contiguous United States but we are only using the first four columns. The first and second columns are a ID for each location, followed by the Location Name. The next column is the date of each occurrence, and the last column is the change in temperature (in Fahrenheit).

Summary Table

The following table is the average change in temperature for each state:
State Temperature Change
Alabama 5.255833
Arizona 6.552619
Arkansas 3.971667
California 5.079524
Colorado 5.826000
Connecticut 6.598889
Delaware 6.416667
Florida 5.498333
Georgia 5.195370
Idaho 4.874000
Illinois 4.742778
Indiana 4.976111
Iowa 5.077222
Kansas 4.323333
Kentucky 4.834167
Louisiana 5.187407
Maine 5.768333
Maryland 6.001250
Massachusetts 6.500556
Michigan 5.241000
Minnesota 6.266296
Mississippi 5.263833
Missouri 4.252778
Montana 5.415000
Nebraska 4.921250
Nevada 6.305000
New Hampshire 6.042500
New Jersey 6.531111
New Mexico 6.715625
New York 6.187167
North Carolina 4.935208
North Dakota 6.723518
Ohio 5.046500
Oklahoma 4.034815
Oregon 4.499259
Pennsylvania 5.709000
Rhode Island 6.700000
South Carolina 4.672857
South Dakota 5.714074
Tennessee 4.957083
Texas 5.667167
Utah 6.209286
Vermont 6.270556
Virginia 5.182778
Washington 4.373000
West Virginia 4.858611
Wisconsin 5.441482
Wyoming 5.171333

This table has all the 48 states in the contiguous US, and their average change in temperature from the last 50 years. We can see that the state with the least change was Arkansas with a 3.9716667 increase in temperature. On the other hand, North Dakota had a 6.7235185, increase, making it the state with the biggest increase.


Charts

The following graph visualizes the Climate Extreme Index:

This graph is intended to show the US Climate Extreme Index from 1920 - 2019, and the relationship between the approximation of the percentage of extreme weather days with the year. What this graph shows is that the amount of extreme weather days was decreasing from 1910 to around 1963, then they began to grow up to where the current years have the highest average percentage of extreme days. This difference for modern times can probably be accounted for by global warming, and the pollution that the world is getting more and more of.

The following map shows temperature data on the contiguous US:

This is an interactive map that is intended to show the changes in temperature by state. From this, we can see that there is no simple correlation between the state’s location and the change in temperature on the state level. Rather, there are sections of the map that have similar temperature changes. The Southwest has a lot of states with massive temp increases, but right next to it are four states that have some of the least temperature increases.